Embrace Your Intellect, Even if it Alienates You

The human race is divided by its diversity of traits. This is a natural and beautiful phenomenon. Given time, we steadily branch outward in every conceivable direction from the generic template of what it means to be human.

Outlying traits corral us into new sub-groups. Each group carries their own connotations of identity. Each classification has its roles. Short and tall, weak and athletic, undignified and refined. Each group is celebrated or condemned arbitrarily. Our most socially acknowledged traits become the center of our identities, bestowing importance because we seem somehow different than others.

Your differences can also make you ashamed. The meaning your society adds can destroy your originality if you allow it. Your ability to produce meaning must be stronger than that of the influences that seek to dominate you. The measure of how a man produces meaning is the strength of his intellect. The smarter you are, the more meaning you can produce.

There is no more powerful, more praised, and more detested quality than a healthy intellect. From intellect, all other things become possible. Because the unintellectual do not understand how this happens, they fear its power. Under this tainted influence, you will never reach your full intellectual potential.

Advantages easily fade. Physical skill, social influence, and financial wealth are powerful indeed, but they are slaves, nonetheless, to entropy. Intellect rages on against the dying of the light. It builds and builds because it can create structure out of chaos. Your intellect will amplify the power of every other part of your life, and spread to those who are ready for it.

A developed intellect destroys social cohesion when others have not made the same cerebral journey. Intelligence processes the entire world. Go far enough along the path and you will scarcely recognize the processes of where you were when you started. You will lose identification with others who cannot see the world the way you now see it.

If you sacrifice intellectual growth for social convenience, you will never know what you can become. As your level of thinking progresses, you will feel yourself pull away from familiar faces. Where you are going, they cannot follow. If you pursue intensely enough, you will go where no one has ever gone. When you reach that point, you produce original thoughts that are more than a combination of the ideas placed inside you.

Take pride in what your superior mind can become, even if it requires your social settings to evolve more rapidly than you might be comfortable with. Be grateful for the compatriots you have when you have them. Carry them in your memory as part of the person you used to be when they are no longer needed. Never be afraid to abandon what came before to find out what will become.

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Gregory Diehl left California at 18 to explore our world and find himself. He has lived and worked in 45 countries so far, offering straightforward solutions to seekers of honest advice and compassionate support in the development of their identities. His first book, Brand Identity Breakthrough, is an Amazon business bestseller. His new book, Travel As Transformation, chronicles the personal evolution worldwide exploration has brought to him and others. Find him at: http://gregorydiehl.net/